Okay guys, I read your chat from today and I see that you have some concern with the level not being in your hands. I have a few questions and maybe I can help out.

First of all, have you figured out how to do specific things, such as make the AI not detect the player unless they're on the ground or in sight?

If you were able to set the AI up, is there something you can export to bring into the main level much like I'm having the design team do?

For the text, can you set triggers to place text? For example, someone mentioned that if the player walked by the bed with someone sleeping in it, the text says "I must be quiet and not disturb them." (not exact words, lol).

Also, none of our buildings will over lap the roads as indicated on the template. Some buildings have been made smaller to give more room in the "alley ways".

Prepare for steam! :) True steampunk has electricity involved as well. Lots of kinetic energy, etc. Trying to keep it "old" we're restricting it to fire/water related power and light. I wish we could keep it to the Persian setting, but there's not enough assets in UE3 to fulfill that.

There are temples. And with these temples will be areas for the player to find a few goodies. This also means there's more space for patrols to walk. I'd suggest keeping the actual patrolling on the ground for all buildings EXCEPT the temples. They're not too big, but big enough to have a few guards walk around.

Experimenting is great Alan, maybe you can create a mini level fore the design team to look to show us what it is we're asking for. Maybe that will help us decide what we need.

There are some ladder in the HU set, can you add the invisible thing to those?

Do you have any other questions for design? We have a master level we can send out if you'd like to take a look at a few things.

As for triggers to throw up some text - absolutely, we can do that with ease.

As for ladders - we can utilize those ladders for the static mesh to indicate the ladder is there. As for actually having ladder interactions - we may be able to make a special brush to define "ladder zones." I know people have done that before in the Unreal engine.

I plan on having the pathing stuff done this weekend. I'll have something to post Saturday, but unfortunately I wasn't able to get much done last night, as I had hoped, because of work stuff.

TBH, I'm not too worried about getting our work integrated into the level once it is "designed." I'm more concerned about making sure we can deliver what you guys need.

Oh, and for the text - could you give us a list of those kinds of events? (Those are perhaps the easiest of the things to deliver)

As long as we'll be able to reuse any kismet we come up with, we should be able to accomplish what we need to, once the super-basic blockout is complete. Once spacing is finalized, we know where we can parade our guards for sure. For now we're just looking at ways to accomplish what's being planned.

We will be good to go with putting text captions. I agree with Alan. We just need a caption script of sorts that details what needs to be displayed and where.

On the steam, Alan said he's had experience with doing steam/smoke effects in Unreal, so I'm confident we'll be able to incorporate that. However, someone (Chris?) also brought up the argument that steam gushing out of mechanical things is generally not a good sign. So we need to make sure we're thinking about reasoning when we're throwing effects around, too.

About the guards… we want guards in the temples, or we don't want them in the temples at all? Do we want any stationary guards placed at certain entrances? I think that can be done relatively easily, but then we're doing three different types of AI total. AI is the most complicated part of all of this. I think it would be really helpful to have an overhead map at some time down the road, with dots representing where stationary guards (if any) need to be and possibly any patrol paths the design team might already have planned for. We might not be able to get the paths exact, but it would at least give us something to shoot for. Otherwise, we can come up with something, too. The big thing is that incorporating just the right number of bots is going to be important to balancing the difficulty. Testing will prove if we over- or under-shoot it.

There are some ladders in the package, but they are static meshes. Really, all we need is a texture to stick on a plane, but using a mesh and assigning no collision would work, too. It just takes a few more polys that way.
Adding the quick ladder fix seems pretty simple and straight-forward.
We'll just need to figure out a scale for the texture, which shouldn't be too hard if all the buildings all about the same height (or at least the ones with ladders.) An overhead with dots for ladder placement wouldn't be a bad idea, either, unless there's already some sort of notation as to where ladders need to go.

And I have a concern… I had thought we had most of the interactions decided already (I had emailed you about what we could do and we seemed to be on the same page) so when you say the design team is still deciding things, that worries me. We don't want to end up with feature creep!
I think I'm going to push for a final set of objectives to get approved and locked down, just to make sure we stay realistic about all of this. We haven't had a concrete plan of how the level experience is supposed to play out yet and I think a sort of "walk through" detailing what happens as you progress would be beneficial to everyone.